Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Death by peanut butter: Trump replaces nutrition with corruption. Of course.

Nameless low-end, low-nutrition "surplus" foods offered via a Trump Food Box, the execrable program to be administered by chicken man, Sonny Perdue as USDA chief. The program will impair the health of recipients, and damage local farmers' income as many farm stands DO accept SNAP payments for fresh foods.

Mr. Trump, as part of your punishment for being the least intelligent US president ever, the greediest and most heartless, here is what I suggest: When you are convicted of your corruption and your treasonous acts, that you be required to eat all your meals until the moment of your death from a USDA food box. Alone. In your cell. With no phone.If a USDA food box is good enough for struggling people just trying to get along, it's good enough for a bloated bit of thoroughly degraded human DNA, a puppet whose strings are pulled by an equally despicable ex-KGB agent, masquerading as president of the United States.

Trump may well be able to force this inhumane and corruption-ready plan on Congress and thus on an already suffering US population. I wouldn't doubt it, his (not our) Secretary of Agriculture being Sonny, the useless offspring of chicken man Frank Perdue, and well able to lie with a straight face. I'm sure, with his underpaid workers and virtually no benefits for either workers or product--the battery chickens of the Delmarva Peninsula are unacceptable in the EU, for example, because they are so likely to be substandard and full of bacteria--Perdue is precisely the person you want overseeing a cynically orchestrated dilution of SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program). SNAP is a program that was designed, during the humane era pre-Trump, to ensure at least minimal health for Americans experiencing poverty until they can regain a modest measure of American wealth. It has done so for fifty years or so; naturally, proto-Trumpanzees have long decried the program because they believe it makes people lazy (just the opposite, actually, because they have energy) and greedy (minimal, as it is a paper program administered centrally, not a hand-delivery program to be used as a sinecure by every witless corrupt local official who can get his or her hand into the food box graft conveyor belt.)

According to an MSN report, "Major agricultural and food lobby groups refrained from comment, while one anti-hunger group was alarmed at the proposal."

I was alarmed. And a lot more than just I and the anti-hunger group should be alarmed. This ludicrous crawl back into Victorian paternalism mode should alarm those receiving benefits, those concerned about those receiving benefits, and anyone who cares about the economy of the United States.

Typical selection of fresh foods and protein bought with SNAP coupons

The food stamp (SNAP) program allows beneficiaries to choose the foods they believe will best keep them healthy. Of course not everyone knows as much about nutrition as a nutritionist, or even possibly an upper-income homemaker. But assuredly, most know nutrition better than Donald J. Trump, consumer of well-done beef, chemical-laced soft drinks, and little else. Most know that a diet of peanut butter and canned vegetables--with not a fresh bit of nutrition in sight--will not keep people healthy. Indeed, it will lead to overuse of the already strained--no, I meant to say absent--health care system in the US.

If you wanted to kill off the poor more quickly than you already are, Mr. Trump, I cannot think of a better way to do it than this. The MSN report concluded:

The
plan would replace a system that’s working "with a Rube-Goldberg
designed system of commodity distribution via food boxes that will be
administratively costly, inefficient, stigmatizing, and prone to
failure," Jim Weill, president of the Washington-based Food Research
& Action Center, said in a statement.

It will be corruption at its finest, rivaling any OTHER banana republic for depth and breadth. Note, I said any other banana republic and that's exactly what I meant. It will cost a fortune, with most of the dollars siphoned off in paying overseers for the minimum-wage workers distributing food boxes, a far cry from the clean, well-paid and relatively few administrative tasks required for food stamps. It will not only stigmatize the poor; it will kill them.

It will also harm local farmers, whose farm stands can accept food stamp (SNAP) payments, and often do, as it helps them out with a little extra cash, and helps those using SNAP to eat fresh foods. After all this, I have only two questions:

When is the US going to rise up en masse against the monster in the White House?

And why did MSN put the two most cogent bits, used above, at the very end of its article?

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Ranting, it is sometimes called. I prefer Op-Ed. Indeed, I never worked as an opinion page editor for a newspaper; I could never have espoused the beliefs of the management, but only my own. I have contributed op-eds to newspapers and online publications, notably BushWatch, which featured one of mine "above the fold" in its last-ever issue after Mr. Obama was elected.

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